Conographia
by kittu9
Summary: They never said that they were enlightened, but there was evidence about them of things unseen. [Vignettes from the Royai 100 Challenge]
1. From yesterday

97. _From Yesterday_

The music begins hesitantly as warbling, adolescent strains fill the room. It sounds as awkward as the young cadet feels until the first glorious crescendo, when everything falls, suddenly and with absolute precision, into place. The ball has officially begun.

For a brief instant the lovely, understated silhouettes and perfect profiles of girls with the slender necks of swans rising above their shoulders captivate him. However, his speech never falters in its even cadence and nothing betrays his rapturous amazement at the sight of a roomful of cadets in hopeful blue and the young women accompanying them. The girls are bedecked in fine, glimmering fabrics and precious gems. They are all of them pieces of a fabulously adorned, brightly coloured puzzle.

It is his first military dress function. He is so bedazzled and so determined not to show it that he turns and moves to dance first with the most plainly attired woman there—a female cadet his own age or perhaps a little younger. Like him, she is also in dress uniform, brilliantly blue and starched—although perhaps with crisper creases. She is obviously better with an iron than he.

She has a quite, precise air about her that makes her both a suitable dance partner and the prettiest girl in the room.

They dance wonderfully together. When the music stops, before he is composed enough to step back, bow, and take his leave to move about the room, they hear the gracious applause of the collected assembly. In this case, the assembly consists of the officers and their wives (some of them inappropriately young), the cadets, the women from about town. Also the spinster chaperones that sit primly to the side, smiling at the couples on the floor that are able to execute the neat pattern of a waltz.

The cadets bow to each other and part ways; he moves to socialize and she stands at the sidelines. She is respectfully attentive to the war stories of a superior officer, and even dances with him; a spirited polka that has her clinging to his hands for dear life.

She dances also with a boy near her own age; he is blond, strong-featured, and strangely awkward. Compared to her, his steps are heavy and hesitating. Unlike her first partner, his palms are sweaty. She is polite, but refuses a second dance.

The rest of the evening passes, for her, without incident. Her dark-haired partner from that first dance flirts diplomatically with the girls about him, but he leaves quietly as well. The two of them walk out together, unobtrusively, and go their separate ways at the door. The ball is over, all of it to be packaged away in large boxes with crisp paper and those fine dresses the young girls wore. The memory of the evening will be pulled out like an heirloom by a group of those dwindled, frail chaperones. They will remember each detail vividly and hungrily, colouring the events with phrases they think are romantic.

Years later they will reminisce about _this_ party, _this_ dance, remembering the silks in a brighter hue, the lace-edged handkerchiefs and the blue dress uniforms more neatly starched. They will talk about that dance like it's some sort of myth, a beautiful story to tell the girls that visit them in their tiny, old homes.

_Do you remember those dancing soldiers?_ One of them will ask, leaning her body so far forward that she is in danger of falling out of her chair. _The dark-haired boy and that blonde girl._

The old gossips will recall the sweet, clear movements, the splendid turns about the floor.

_It was amazing,_ another will remark. _They were really the most beautiful things I will ever imagine._ (She wonders to herself if it was a dream, but dismisses the idea; it is not a possibility that she wishes to consider.)

Immortalizes in careful, measured time, those two impossible people dance on without fumbling into the dark of some unsolicited memory. There is a smooth, repetitious movement to it, causing the dance to loop back around it self again and again with that fragile human blindness characteristic of those beloved on this earth.

_(But it really wasn't like that;_ one of the old women tries to explain on her deathbed. _It was even more wonderful than I can remember, more wonderful that that distortion time allows.)_

_(Oh_, she whispers, falling asleep, _if only you could have seen that dance, like they were the only people left in one small world, in that small place that time provid_es…)

Somewhere in the world, Roy and Riza are still young, and dancing.


	2. The side of the face

48. _Side of the Face_

If you study the Colonel's face closely, you can detect the faint bristling of dark hair on his cheeks and the sharp, too-thin curve of his jaw; he has forgotten to shave.

Between his eyes are small furrows, a weary, pinched look. He is tired, uneasy, overburdened.

First Lieutenant Hawkeye is little better; though she is unaware of it, her face also betrays her exhaustion. The set of her chin, her clenched jaw, the creases across her nose and cheeks from sleeping face down, her head buried in the crook of her arm—she sleeps on her eyes because she does not trust them to stay shut. She is not certain of what she might, in dreams, catch a glimpse of.

Together, the sides of their faces are the only visible equation; the two of them are sitting together, exhausted, heads bent closely together over yet another urgent file. There is little consideration, if any, for personal space between them—and indeed, now, it would make no sense at all.

Seeing the Colonel and the First Lieutenant tired and tense like that, you can imagine that they are watching over a child's first real illness—their own child, maybe. You are tired enough that the idea of the two of them together is a plausible argument.

Your own eyes are tired. Sitting here, watching them from across the room, their profiles blur together and you can almost imagine their probable, dream child's face. You think: dark hair, serious eyes, and tiny lines that will haunt the lips of their daughters and the eyes of their sons, someday, maybe, yes, if they live through all of this to one day become old.


	3. Fingertips

50. _Fingertips_

These are the crisp conduits of nature: knuckle, finger, nail, and the knobby recession back to the wrist.

Her nails are well groomed and short; his are the same, with barely perceptible calluses on the first three: middle, index, and thumb. Her fingers are perhaps stronger than his are—but when they hold hands in secret, they do it with all the tender harshness of poets, of realists.

They let lives fall through their finger and land in their laps, knowing far too well that what they are hoping for is unlikely to come to pass.

They hold each other's hands tightly; as if trying to leave love notes in the tiny half-moon indentations their nails leave behind in each other's skin.


	4. Kiss

91. _Kiss_

At first, like butterflies, the gentle fluttering of eyelashes against the face; soft heartbeats, small and afraid, stuttering like stuck moths in lamplight.

Then, in all quietness, like tired, forgiving animals, they bump faces and become still, nose to nose, eyelash the blinking eyelash, breath and breath.

They stare at each other in that abnormal, gasping stillness, unbelieving and skeptical of this moment's true meaning, if there is any. They wait, uncomfortably, for an interruption.


	5. Weapon and fine

5. _Weapon (Heiki) & Fine (Heiki) _Manga Chapter 37

Riza didn't often raise her voice, so when she began to yell at him, angrily gesturing with an empty pistol, he felt out of place and oddly guilty.

However, he rationalized, not as guilty as he would have been if Riza had been killed. So he only agreed with her, sounding rather flustered: yes, he was an idiot, yes, of course she was fine, of course she could take care of herself.

He was glad to turn away from her as they walked down the fire escape to the car—it was easier to tell her that he was glad that she was all right without looking her in the eye.

Already there were bruises forming around her neck like some cruel brand, dark shadows formed by someone else's hands.


	6. The you reflected in the glass

65. The you reflected in the glass

Underneath her uniform, she's a lot thinner than anyone ever guesses. Of course, she doesn't consider herself as such—Riza has subtle, sustained curves, enough width the never call herself small—but her waist, her thin wrists and ankles, the long lines of her arms and legs give her an almost delicate appearance.

Looking at Riza from that angle, she seems touchable and within reach.

Roy remembered how, once, at a pointless picnic on an obscenely hot day she wore some sort of summery blouse and skirt set. All through the party he watched her out of the corner of one eye, the judicious movements of her shoulders and the repositioning of her fingers on her glass.

When the party was over and everyone was leaving, all of them tired and a little drunk. Pausing in her task of gathering up abandoned glasses of half-consumed liquor, Riza yawned and stretched, raising her arms over her head and arching her spine along with the motion. The hem of her shirt rose with her arms and Roy had caught a glimpse of her hip, the sharp edginess of her bones straining against the skin like a knife pressed to elastic.

The sight of her, brief and skeletal, had broken his heart.

—Despite her apparent shapelessness in uniform, when Riza dresses down she is all lines. Her breasts and hips are vague curves, soft beneath her shirt and skirt, her shoulders and the bones encircling her throat are like long fingers, sharp lines. Riza is no swan, but she might as well dress in white, as tragically mute and lovely as she is.

Roy writes all of this in he little black book in another language, sketching arrays about the scattered text, thinking of ways to try and make her happy.

He never comes up with much, but the fact that he is trying eases a little of the heartbreak that watching her entails; she wavers subtly, like an image on silvered glass.

It's like she's slipping away from him, ounce by ounce, fat dissolving into compact, unyielding muscle.

It doesn't matter if she weighs the same or not—she has become all hard lines, an equation, part of his small, constricted world. This is something that she is obviously not meant to be, and this makes him, inexplicably, unhappy.

She should be incalculable, he thinks. Some sort of impossible variable in an equation that does not require a solution to prove its existence.


	7. Existence

29. Existence

Although everything about their lives was real, Riza occasionally wonders about what might have been, in a different world.

For instance, there is a dream of the two of them lying together on her bed in her sunny apartment. They are young and in love, carelessly so, with no one to answer to and nowhere that they have to be. All that they must obey is their own desire, the gradual awakening from the warm tangle of arms and legs and blankets. They are lazy and still, enjoying that bright, unfiltered light streaming in from the open window. There is a dog lolling messily atop someone's discarded blazer on the floor.

At last Riza rises, pulls on a shapeless robe and pads barefoot into the kitchen to make coffee and toast, to sort through the mail, to straighten up the kitchen and the bedroom. She sets aside the personal letters—one from her mother, one from Maes and his wife, another from an old schoolmate—washes out two mugs and brings a tray of breakfast back to bed. In her absence, Roy has curled himself inextricably into the covers. She can see his smirk and knows that he is awake, teasing.

But that is not the truth; it is only a wish, one that she does not care to dwell on. She lives in a world outside of her desires, or so she likes to think.

Somewhere today, Riza is home alone in her shabby, clean apartment, her dog lying across her feet. She is in bed, fully dressed, and she is ill with a virus that leaves her a weak, quivering mass of unusable muscles. She is daydreaming of the impossible, trying to ignore the ache in her bones, the unwelcome, heavy hum in her skull. Her life is on hold; the only continuing noises in her frozen word are those of her heartbeat, her pistol's recoil, the _skritch-scratch_ of a pen on paper, drowning out what can never be fully realized as more than a dream.


	8. Words that fade away in the chaos

82. Words that fade away in the chaos.

Roy has always loved words and he shows it, trickling them into his speech like honey, like opium: heavy and golden, slow and ponderous and sweet.

He is a quick study in other languages as well; perhaps he cannot speak them so easily, but he can read those words. He can fathom that meaning.

Riza is foreign to him, a language unto herself, cultivated in the ringing silence after a gunshot. He watches her shoulder her rifle, aim, and fire. Her face never changes and he wonders if there is a secret door that leads into her mind, where she keeps the dictionaries that define her thoughts.


	9. The scent of blood

15. The scent of blood

It's as if Ishvar is an event outside of time, a separate life from the one he lives in now. Perhaps, in a way, this is true.

But it creeps up upon him at the oddest times; he could be buying flowers for Elysia or shopping for groceries and the smells and sounds of the market will churn and blur until he has fallen back through the years. Walking through the restaurant court, he tastes the skim of grease on his lips and remembers the taste of roasted human flesh. Past the butcher shop, past some obscure church reeking animal sacrifice, and he remembers the stench of blood cooking in the hot air around him, that same sort of iron decay.

He is a soldier; he is a scientist. Even as the smell becomes an unwelcome taste in the back of his throat, he stands firm against the rising tide of memory. It is a thing to be endured, although at times Riza comes to him, so shaken as he is, like a stoic's wife. She watched with dark, knowing eyes as he drinks, steadily and with purpose, until he is in an unmoving stupor for he night. Then she moves to drape his overcoat about his shoulders, kiss his forehead, and depart for her own bed.

In the morning, they will have their respective aches: those of the heart, the head. Still, they are soldiers; they do not stop for these small, devastating distractions and phantom pains, smells in the head and incessantly twitching fingers.

Such things are to be endured.


	10. Repentance, Confession

21. Repentance/Confession

It's hard for the two of them to argue normally; because they are so proud, so unyieldingly firm, Roy can never admit to an error and Riza will become a statue, standing before him in martyrish silence. Each of them is convinced of their undistorted _rightness_ and unwillingness to acquiesce to the other.

Roy is always especially shocked, perhaps because Riza rarely reveals her opinion; he is used to her solid, dependable, agreeable—or at least non-judgmental—silence, her accommodating presence.

He goes home early on days when they argue. He can't think.

It is not until he is in bed, one arm thrown over his face to muffle the words, that he can admit that he is wrong.


	11. Great distance

74. Great Distance

_Dear Mother,_ Riza writes on the plain, military-issue paper (which is thin and flat like a sheaf of pressed tobacco), _I hope that this letter finds you well._

She stops to lick her lips and ponder her next sentence. She makes an odd image, sitting there. For one thing, her hair is newly and boyishly cut and she is dressed in plain, drab clothes. Her formal writing seems, somehow, foreign when paired with her still-androgynous figure; Riza is, after all, still very young.

_I am learning patience here_, she finally adds. _It is the epitome of the art of war. I have found someone that I wish to protect._

She stares at what she has written for a moment before shredding the paper and swallowing each dry scrap, small paper angels and ink-sins in her mouth. She puts away her pen and leaves for the shooting range.

Several years later, Riza's mother will receive this in the mail:

-eleven inches of blonde hair, braided and split at the ends,

- a regulation pistol and three spare clips of ammunition,

- an old chemistry text, and

- forty-eight unfinished letters, all of them addressed nebulously to _home_.

Also: a photograph of a dark-haired man with narrow, knowing eyes. Riza herself is in the picture, although her mother only notices her daughter after careful scrutiny. Riza is behind the man and to the left, quiet and stone-faced. On the back, there is a blurred date and a caption: The Flame Alchemist.

There is no mention of Riza, not on the back of the picture, and no explanation in the box of possessions. Riza's mother boxes these things up carefully.

She ponders blowing her brains out with Riza's old pistol, to keep Riza set firmly on her course. She dismisses this idea, however; Riza has no life left to come back to anyway. Any sort of physical death between the two of them is redundant.

Her mother puts the box away, out of sight, and rewrites the date on the back of the photo before tucking it in between the pages of her dream journal. That night she dreams of death on the battlefield and, instead of recording it faithfully within the book she makes herself a cup of tea and drinks it slowly, staring at the photograph.

_My daughter is dead_, she thinks to herself, not daring to say the words out loud. The she washes out her teacup and says nothing at all.


	12. If I die

94. "If I die"

He is in a morbid state and he looks the part, his hair elegantly mussed and his uniform carefully disheveled. Before him on his desk lay these things: his gloves, a small black book (white pages, unlined, notes and arrays taken in red and black ink), a stack of unsigned papers (approximately two and four-nineteenths of an inch tall) three volumes of what might be poetry, a bottle of alcohol (no glass), and pictures, pictures, pictures. Boxes of them. Many of the photographs are of Roy himself (in them he looks harassed but happy) but they are mostly pictures of Gracia and Elysia, the small family that loved Maes Hughes as entirely as he loved them. (But Roy is not jealous of that, _no no no no_; there is nothing special about leaving people behind, about grief after death. He is lucky, to be as unattached as he is.)

(He is a damned liar and a fool as well, for thinking that.)

A movement in the doorway; Roy looks up from the pictures to meet Hawkeye's calm gaze. His own eyes are hurt and inexplicably angry. This sort of sorrow is intense, profound, and private; Hawkeye feels like an invader.

_If you die_, Roy's eyes seem to say, _you had damn well better make sure that I will not be left like this, weeping after you._

Hawkeye retreats, closing the door of his office without a word; as she does so, she vows that when she does die, there will be nothing left to mourn but blood, bullets, and ash.


	13. Diary, Journal

61. Diary/Journal

_I am bothered lately with this strange wanting for you, _he confides in one of his letters. _I have found images of you in the most abstract of senses—for instance, in a beam of light caught by a chain I see your sternly coiled hair and remember a time when you bound me more greatly to my purpose. _(Here there is a sequence of scribbled out words, too dark to read, and then his flowing script resurfaces.)

_I think of you often, _his letter concludes, lamely. _I remain faithfully yours and, as always, I wish you happiness._

(These lines are perhaps not completely true, and in fact read as if he has copied them from some other author's work; without a doubt, however, the recipient of these letters will understand.)

In the end, he does not sign his name and he does not send the letter; instead, he adds it to the teetering stack of notes that he has collected on the balancing of equations and the lesser properties of Hydrogen.

_We have something more than mere chemistry,_ he scrawls on the back of the envelope, and watches with blank eyes as the entire paper stack falls down about him like a house of cards.


	14. Watching over you

76. Watching Over You

It is winter and they are still alive.

She loves him without any specific word or action; he knows this, but cannot otherwise understand or comment upon her feelings. He is not certain as to who is being selfish.

_Will you still follow me?_ He asks.

Her response is another question_: you're asking me now?_

The two of them are dancing around judgment with the tenuous grace of the dedicated and confused. This is not some sort of fairy tale—and anyway, Roy's manner is now very seldom regal and Riza has never been a princess of any kind. If anything, she s a talisman, the good luck charm given to an ineffectual hero in an attempt to keep him from falling clumsily upon his own sword.

(This is all figuratively speaking, of course. Right now he knows little else, and Riza is not saying anything.)


	15. In the dead of night

47. In the Dead of Night

Really, she seems even fiercer as she lies sleeping in his arms. There is a hopeless quality to her body, the curious slanting of her twitching fingers and the sudden deepening of her breath as Roy shifts to lie more comfortably alongside her.

Her hair is cast over her face and Roy moves to brush it away from her frail eyelashes, lest it wake her.

The graceful slouch of her spine as she moves in her sleep is the only vulnerable and human characteristic that he can identify.

Right now it is quiet and her sleep is unnatural, focused; in the morning, no trace will remain of her wild presence.


	16. Storelined streets

8. Store-lined Streets

She is as particular about groceries as she is about most things; butchers view her with a sort of gruff respect, wiping their large hands on stained aprons before attending to her order.

Likewise, the merest sighting of her on the streets leads the greengrocers to bring out their best and to sweep around the large vegetable crates at the front of the store.

She is precise, uses exact change, and she never wastes anyone's time. If half of the proprietors are in love with her she pays them no mind, gathering her bags and nodding farewell before she walks home alone to her empty apartment.


	17. Gift

59. Gift

The summer was inexplicably hot and dry and he could feel the weight of it creeping upon him. The few breezes that the day provided served only to emphasize the oppressive heat and as a result of it there was little work to be done. Instead, the various and sundry members of his command dispersed themselves throughout the compound. Riza alone was still inside the office, no doubt filing paperwork and preparing another monolith of documents for him to sign.

Roy dismissed the others for the day before he reentered the office; once there he sat half-heartedly at his desk, occasionally attending to the papers that Riza placed before him. More often though, he watched her with open fascination, the noble and determined curvature of her face.


	18. Conversation

30. Conversation

If he were feeling exceptionally childish and good-natured, he would creep up behind her and cover her eyes with his elegantly gloved hands. Riza would sigh and push him away and go about her business as usual.

Once, his hands were bare; his skin pressed warmly against her eye sockets. "You can't see me," he told her, the tone of his voice anything but cheerful. He sounded like a raw wound.

Riza reached up and placed her hands over his. Beneath their joined hands, her closed eyes burned with something fierce and hopeless that she did not wish to put a name to.

"I always know where you are," she said.

He moved his hands. His face seemed as dark and unreadable as the world outside the office window—it was long past late, and the sky was heavy with rain-pregnant clouds.

Riza handed him a file. "Please sign these, sir," she told him. He laughed, weakly, and although the room lightened, the shadows still lined the creases of his face and the depth of his eyes. Riza didn't think that that sort of darkness—pervasive and unfading, like a deep stain—would ever leave him.


	19. Shirt

32. Shirt

He once bought a silk undershirt and gave it to her as a gift. He liked to image the feel of it, smooth over her skin.

She slept in it. Once, lurking about her room as she prepared herself for a military dress function (she served a threefold purpose at these events: body guard, chauffeur, and dance partner), he found it shoved beneath one of the pillows on her bed, made hollow with the long impression of her body. He lifted it to his face, imagined the putting on and taking off of such a garment. It smelled, very faintly, of sweat and smoke.


	20. Dependency

27. Dependency

Really, without him she is nothing. This knowledge is like a deep throbbing in her mind, a malignant tumor—or perhaps more subtle, a form of arrhythmia, the fluttered and off-kilter beatings of her heart. Four chambers dependent upon a solitary thing, breathing equals oxygen equals existence, please god.

(This is nothing but a bizarre, desperate imagining, and she wonders if she is at all essential to him—this man who is her whole world, who allows her into that gregarious space around him. Herself, a timid and frightened moon floating uncertainly around him, the greater, essential gravitational force.)


	21. Proof

**12**. Proof

The most significant property of the equation of their lives together is the word "if." Still, added together, there is something that it is lacking utterly in one major component.

There is a heart to their relationship, but whether or not there is a body in which to house it remains to be seen.


	22. Scenery from a car seat

**64.** The scenery from a car seat

He hates cars, but he does not mind them so much when she is the one who is driving.

Riza's posture is her first noticeable trait, and seated beside her Roy is allowed an unrestricted view of her profile. He pretends to sleep, his head lolling against the window. His eyes are actually half-slits, and he blinks occasionally, in time with the light that filters through the windshield. There are some strange patterns that illuminate her pale neck and the soft angles of her face; one hovers like a butterfly just above the not-quite curve of her upper lip.

She knows that he is watching and it bothers her only slightly; most of the time, her attention is on the road ahead, which is long and strangely lit. Above the earth, the sky is a strange and giddy blue. On the dash in front of them lies a thick envelope containing a letter, a separating force between this world and the time capsule of the automobile.

It is summer, Riza's hair is still cropped military-short, Roy is still a lieutenant colonel, they are looking for a man named Elric. Their lives are at last susceptible to—indeed, dependent on—a land that seems unrelated to that wasteland of crippled, burning bodies and stale air, far and away behind them.


	23. Awakening

**45.** Awakening

Out there, the sun causes the landscape to ripple with a mixture of the vindictive sun and the heat that rises steadily, reflecting off of the pale ground. She is sometimes unsure if her targets are real or not. At night, when the temperature drops away from the amber colour is holds during the day, she feels more lucid.

She volunteers for midnight watch often, and sits outside of her Spartan tent, staring at the watch fires on the nights when she is not on duty.

Across the camp in the men's quarters, her charge sleeps as if drugged. In daylight he is her sole focus, that dark smudge of his hair and the greasy pillar of smoke rising across the barren desert. She does not yet love him, but she faithful to the knowledge that she will probably follow him for the rest of her life.

She wonders if he notices her; her skin is still pale, despite the constant sun, and her hair has only faded from gold to flax. She blends in with her khaki cloak and the bright world around them, one true constant. (Although sometimes she wavers unsteadily, like a mirage, she is one of the few who has yet to fall, victim to the heat and brilliance that refuses to abate.)

Like those around her, though, her eyes are becoming blank.


	24. Happiness?

**92.** Happiness?

Hawkeye's laugh, when released, was bright and dark all at once, a suddenness and pitch matched almost exactly by the combined noises of bells and gunfire. (Almost, but not quite; any other attempt to reproduce the quality of her voice by artificial means left Roy feeling somehow cheated, as if there was no substance to digest. Once he had encountered the real Riza Hawkeye, he supposed, there could be no replacing of her.)

She didn't laugh often or loudly, but when she did—kindly and throatily, muting the tonality of her careful voice—Roy needed no other forms of acknowledgement.

He did wonder, ruefully, if her laughter was just in fact another tactic by which she kept her distance from him. Hawkeye was clever like that, and shrewd enough to be able to use it effectively against him. He wanted to kiss her, but when she seemed—not happy, but perhaps _amused_—it seemed such a shame to interrupt. Possibly, Roy thought (though not without some humor of his own), that was what she found funny.


	25. Giddiness

**70.** Giddiness

He was fondest of the image of her leaning over him, her eyes lit from within by a strange and glowing contentedness, her torso stretched out leanly and the small, inviting depression at the base of her spine, welcoming the heavy warmth of his palms. It wasn't an image he was rewarded with often, but he cherished it nonetheless.

Similar to it, and perhaps infinitely more precious, was that faint and tender memory he had of her slumbering deeply in the hollow his body had left on their bed, her form wrapped warmly in one of his old, oversized shirts.


	26. Surprise attack

**85.** Surprise Attack

The first time Maes had shoved a newborn Elysia into Roy's arms, gushing enthusiastically all the while, Roy had been pleasantly surprised by the feel of the baby's slight weight in the crook of his arm.

He found himself thinking_, I wouldn't be such a bad father, really_, and then caught himself wondering what Hawkeye would look like, holding a child. It was a reflexive thought and it haunted him for weeks afterward, an unguarded image of the stern lieutenant made softer by a small, real person. Roy blamed it all on Maes, of course, but he noticed also that the girl he was currently dating, this week, resembled Hawkeye in her own small way: bright hair, dark eyes, a long look that he could follow from across the room.


	27. A walk

**33.** A Walk

Meeting on the street; an unscripted affair, it seemed commonplace, benign. She was walking her dog along the bright square, her hair unbound about her shoulders. He had crept up alongside her and placed a flower—one brilliant, scarlet zinnia—behind her ear.

She was smiling; it was going to be a beautiful day.


	28. Battlefield

**3.** Battlefield

When she had just returned from the war, she had heard the sound of bells, dimly; children were being released from school somewhere in the town, a laughing and innocent group of pale and arrogant boys and girls.

In her numbness (she was so tired that she was leaning, heavily, against Roy's side, that his arm was about her waist, supporting her), she thought that she was still in the desert, that those screams of joy were really just the sounds of someone else dying, and the bells only a minor reprieve—as if the soldiers on the hill ahead had only run out of guns, for a moment.

It began to rain; beside her it was Roy's turn to sag, and the two of them together could not muster the strength to move towards shelter. They stood there, drenched and lost, until Maes came upon them, carrying an umbrella, and led them back to the company barracks.


	29. Home cooking

**31.** Home cooking

By candle light (the storm had damaged both the electric lights and the gas generator), on the floor (the desk was somehow awkward), Hayate at her side (as if the dog had somehow supplanted her inconsistent shadow), they managed well enough with a sandwich that Roy had guiltlessly ordered Hawkeye to pilfer from Breda's snack drawer and the fruit juice that Furey had inexplicably left in the company lounge. The sandwiches were not quite stale; Roy's was made up of thick white bread layered with tissue-thin pieces of some dark and flavorful meat and tasteless, dense tomatoes (out of season, of course). There was lettuce as well, and, to his immense and delicately expressed disgust, mayonnaise. Hawkeye had brought her own sandwich—left over from the lunch hour she had forgotten to take. Hers was whole wheat, avocados, sprouts, and a judicious application of turkey salad. There was a dill pickle next to one of her as-yet uneaten crusts that both Hayate and Roy were eyeing.

It was very late, everyone had gone home, and except for that damn dog (Roy thought), rather a perfect set up. He wondered if his first lieutenant would lighten up any time soon or if he would have to work on her a little. Judging from the sizable pile of paperwork in her lap, he was betting on the latter. One of those things, he thought, that never quite changes, even when you wish devoutly that it could.


	30. Hidden expressions, feelings

**90.** Hidden Expressions / Hidden Feelings

Happiness can be condensed down to the slightly crooked cast her lips take on when she is fighting a smile, the arrogant closure of his eyes, the smell of something burning on a street corner, the harsh and grating vocalizations of a joyful dog—these are small sums of power in the world. It reminds them of the steady and irritating beat of traditional music on festival days.

But it is fleeting too; Riza remembers the starved, anxious look of a particular widow on a street corner, wrapped in muted shawls and holding a small child. The woman had dark skin and those appalling, tell-tale scarlet-amber eyes—she was the first person that Riza recognized as a refugee, and the feeling was not unlike being punched suddenly and unexpectedly with a metal-clad fist. Riza had avoided eye contact like a plague, and as she passed by, the woman had flinched at the faint noise of Riza's military boots walking on dust.


	31. Drawing a boundry line

**72.** Drawing a boundary line

This too is important: the golden, slippery feel of a poorly sliced piece of exotic fruit, a mango, and that odd bitter taste after the first wet and sweet mouthful. The world is not perfect and Roy cannot understand what kind of metaphor is being presented to him. Riza remembers the last time she ate a pomegranate (a scarlet globe filled with gelatinous seed casings, pulpy inexact centers, a cellular universe, almost embryo-like) and she will not make a clearer illustration of temptation for him; she has worn that she will never touch that fruit again.


	32. Military personnel

**1. **Military personnel

_I would wish for a thousand wishes if I had but one wish!_ a beggar on the corner cries. Hawkeye stops and ponders this before deciding that her wish would be for constancy—she does not elaborate—and posing the question the rest of the office.

The answers vary from Furey's timid request for warm weather—it is smoggy and overcast out of doors, a vile sort of not-damp cool weather—to Havoc's surly demand for more cigarettes (he has run out unexpectedly, the last three destroyed by a cheerful and oblivious Hughes' spilled coffee). Roy sticks his head out from his office and proclaims loudly that his wish is to see all of the women in the military attired in miniskirts. The men laugh, a few of them a bit wistfully, and Hawkeye's mouth recedes into a thin, unhappy line. No one quite notices her hurt, or interprets it as such, but the office is quiet for the rest of the day, and when her eyes meet Roy's there is an odd and awkward quality of silence resounding between them.


	33. Pain and wounds

**28.** Pain and wounds

Roy appreciates the futility of Steinbeck, but whenever he extols the virtues of one of the man's novels—_Of Mice and Men_, for example—Hawkeye looks at him with those indefatigably watchful eyes of hers and asks him if he has read over the documents concerning the state of the injured and mentally disturbed persons within the borders of Ishvar.


	34. Quirks

**67.** Quirks

While her teasing always startles him, he understands that she really has no other way to motivate him—and anyway, adrenaline is most effective if it is used correctly.

Also it is because in the way the only galvanizing force she had was a gun; and her aim is good, uncannily so. She doesn't miss, so for her this kind of pretending is almost a joke.

Roy also understands the role of women in the military, and Hawkeye's is obvious: to intimidate.


	35. Scars

**17. ** Scars

There is a slick cataract that coats memories of unpleasant events; for example, after Hughes' death (no one says "murder," but they are thinking it), the world seemed to take on a pale blue haze, as if life without photographs of a smiling four year-old constantly brandished by a manically grinning man was now a useless, bereft existence.

They pretended nothing had changed, of course. But when the light bent through the windows at odd angles one would glance ate Hawkeye and the colonel and think that a peculiar kind of heaviness had settles between them, as if some mere distance between them had blurred the further into obscurity.


	36. Sigh

**53.** Sigh

Any human heart would be touched by them, their carefully non-existent senses of self; it is, invariably, a beautiful thing. (But it is beautiful like a bruise, with broken blood vessels pooling beneath the skin—or still more like a cancer cell, a colourful and deadly array so intent upon the science of living that it has forgone the system of equal trade: if you exist, you are subject to death.)

When someone once asked, at a party (Riza remembers that it was Gracia who posed the question, innocently), what kind of animal they thought they might be it was Roy who answered, in his self-depreciating way, that of course he would be a dog, they would all be dogs—weren't they, in fact, dogs already? and Riza had said nothing for a long moment (because it was really a habit for her by now, to measure the importance of things with silence, with a sort of fragile care) and answered that she would be a bird of prey. It suits you, she was told. The rest of the party thought it an incredibly clever reference to her eyes and her aim. Of course that makes sense, for her, they said.

Roy is the only one who realizes, much later that night, why she sees herself this way: Riza is loyal, incredibly and painfully loyal, and hunters of that species mate for life.


	37. Promise

**10.** Promise

Upon their first meeting, his bearing struck her; he was arrogant, focused, and any hope for a better world was slowly being leeched away from him.

When their eyes met, they saw potential for greatness; she decided that she could support him. Hers was already an uneasy life, peppered with assignments that required a steady hand and gun secreted upon her person. He was as much of an escape from her anonymous life as she was willing to bargain for.

She promised to protect him and did not notice the measuring glance that he gave her. It would be a few weeks more before she understood his moods and gestures well enough to read him. For now, she was content unaware of the great enormity of his purpose.

She didn't love him, but perhaps she would love the man that he was beginning to become.


	38. Categorize

**80.** Categorize

_(her thoughts on the matter)_

I want to be by your side.

No.

I want to be pressed _against_ your side, to be back-to-back with you. I want strange and childish things, for you to listen to me when I am speaking to you, for you to sign the papers that really do have to be filed. I want selfish things also: the warm, protecting circle of your arms, that smile you use only on special occasions.

I do not want to be left alone without you again, grieving as though I have been wounded unto death and the world's end.


	39. Halves

**40.** Halves

Sometimes in a fit of blind exasperation she wonders what it is about him that she loves so much. He is arrogant and lazy and he makes horrible, flirtatious jokes about other women and he has never, ever, not once, treated her as much more than one of his staff.

(But then Riza sometimes thinks that instead of a love-token she carries an ideal of the Colonel close to her heart. She can bring herself to believe this because she has seen the way that he tries to protect the Elric brothers, she knows how genuinely fond he is of Hughes, how the Colonel does not really mind having photographs of Elysia thrust upon him with every waking breath.)

(Also, she knows this essential truth: should the world come to fall apart, even at that last and unrecorded morpheme of the universe, it will come down to their determined love and their dream for a brave new world.)


	40. Reaching voice and unreachable with a vo...

**16.** Reaching voice and unreachable with a voice

This one night, when he arrives home, it is very dark, and the only light in the front hall shines from her lovely eyes. The two of them embrace without a word before she takes his coat and he bends to let the dog take a cursory sniff at his hands.

In the humble kitchen he finds a mug of tea and a note: _Welcome back,_ it says in her exact and even script._ I love you._

He turns and looks at her; she is standing behind his shoulder, as she has always done, and he loves her so deeply that for a brief and dazzling instant he believes that his heart might break.

He cannot speak yet; but even without words, without touching, they are far from silent. Even across the room, their eyes have done all the talking.


	41. Things one cannot understand

**19. **Things one cannot understand

For a long time after Hughes' death, Hawkeye refused to visit the gravesite. It wasn't until four months after the funeral, long after she had grown used to keeping a closer watch on the Colonel, that she actually came across Hughes' things.

It wasn't intentional—just one day the gradual shifting of dog-eared papers and fingerprint stained folders marked with odd, circling patterns imprinted by the leaky bottoms of coffee mugs revealed a box of photographs. There were pictures, company ones mostly—and of course there were portraits of Hughes' small and beautiful family. Riza skimmed through them quickly, almost ignoring them until she came upon a photograph of the Colonel holding Hughes' small daughter very gently in his arms. The expression on his face was both curious and heart wrenching—full of wonderment, as if bemused. Riza did not react outwardly, except to sweep the remaining piles of photographs into an empty file folder, shoving it deep within the stack she planned to take home with her.

As it happened, she didn't go home. She almost stopped by the cemetery, but something unseen—perhaps the memory of her commanding officer remarking upon a non-existent rain—stopped her. She took a left turn instead of a right, walked aimlessly for a half-hour. She came to Hughes' front door unthinkingly, and rung the bell; as she awaited the quiet footsteps of Hughes' widow, she fingered the folder in her bag.

Gracia opened the door. Riza looked at her for a long moment, in the secret way or strong women before stepping inside.

Gracia sat Riza down at the kitchen table, smiling. With no preamble, Riza began to speak; "I wonder if it is easier to have had love at all to begin with," she said.

Gracia glanced, as mothers are wont to do, up the stairs.

And this was almost too much; Riza left the folder on the table and fled the house without another word. She walked all over the neighborhood for another few hours, unable to comprehend the sadness within her. Finally, she went home; Hayate met her at the doorway, but did not bark. She made herself a coffee and sat, stroking his head. She had never noticed the hurt until now.


	42. Before we know each other

**9**. Unknown past / before we know each other

Once, in an attempt to soothe the sharp attitude of her shoulders he placed a hand against her spine. His intentions were platonic; he had known her for only a very little time. Still, she shuddered away from him, her eyes wide with some unnamed fear. Roy had felt hurt, but he had understood the message; Hawkeye could not shrug off her stiff bearing, could not ease herself into the other, gentler self that she kept tucked neatly and secretly away in the other hemisphere of her brain.


	43. If you would only turn around

**84.** If you would only turn around

He both dislikes and admired her great ability for distance; he does not understand that his slightest action is more than enough to jar her suddenly and obviously into that place behind his right shoulder. He is an idiot, a magician, anything but an alchemist, and before anyone else's eyes she is transmuted into a loving, breathing thing, transfixed by the beauty of him.


	44. Crowd

**83.** Crowd

Dining out with his staff: even coughing through the thick cloud of Havoc's cigarette smoke, Roy was enjoying himself. They were past the entrée now (it had had something, he thought vaguely, to do with fish), laughing drunkenly (Hughes) and excitedly (Breda) over the complicated dessert menus. Roy found himself more and more distracted by Hawkeye, the only sober one among them (ah, well, someone would remark later, a bit wistfully. She's probably a mean drunk). She was arguing with Falman, a bit one-sidedly. He was smiling at her, as a father might, humoring her with half of his attention (the other half was fixed on holding poor Fuery up out of his plate). Roy noticed that her hair was down about her shoulders and that when she leaned forward he could glimpse the sweet curve of her breast in the scooped neckline of her blouse.

Hawkeye was incredibly amusing when she was unofficial and angry, he thought. She kept punctuating her sentences with swift hand gestures.

Come one, she was saying. Listen to me.


	45. Syllogism

**86.** Syllogism

One day while reading the dictionary, as an excuse to avoid _real_ work, Roy discovers the word "antipyretic" and wonders who added the synonyms for Hawkeye to the definition.


	46. Now

**95.** Now

Her unpainted mouth is a source of constant fascination to him. It is true that her lips need no adornment, that such colourful accoutrements would be, on her, vulgar and useless. Roy is not certain why this is so, until he notices that her eyes are similar; she does not decorate the skin about them either, and her eyes are her best features.

He realizes that there are tiny histories embedded in her countenance, a fascinating saga in the impressive, naked contours of her face.


	47. Implicit rules

76. Watching Over You

It is winter and they are still alive.

She loves him without any specific word or action; he knows this, but cannot otherwise understand or comment upon her feelings. He is not certain as to who is being selfish.

_Will you still follow me?_ He asks.

Her response is another question_: you're asking me now?_

The two of them are dancing around judgment with the tenuous grace of the dedicated and confused. This is not some sort of fairy tale—and anyway, Roy's manner is now very seldom regal and Riza has never been a princess of any kind. If anything, she s a talisman, the good luck charm given to an ineffectual hero in an attempt to keep him from falling clumsily upon his own sword.

(This is all figuratively speaking, of course. Right now he knows little else, and Riza is not saying anything.)


	48. Cureless

**14.** Covered eyes

That first step into a dark room, before her eyes adjust—this frightens her deeply, more than she knows how to articulate. It's like her whole life, a blind leap that she hasn't yet gathered the faith and courage to make.


	49. Match

**26.** Cureless

As she maneuvers the car down the street towards headquarters, she catches sight of Gracia Hughes on the sidewalk, walking with the subdued posture of the bereaved. Before she can stop herself, Hawkeye looks to the Colonel and says, bleakly, that she cannot imagine living with such great unhappiness.

"Ah, Lieutenant," he says gently, for her sake, "you have your own kind of daily grief that you must live with."

Between this truthful statement and the kindness of his eyes, Hawkeye is torn apart. She nods tersely, to avoid weeping, and locks her eyes upon the road ahead.


	50. Someone I want to protect

**37.** Match

Once they caught themselves each trying to understand the occupations of the other. She was studying chemistry and reading poetry (John Donne this week, a veritable discourse In salvation anxiety) and he sat watching her carefully, his gloved hands folded beneath his chin, as if protecting her from any intrusion the outside world could devise.


	51. Death

**23.** Someone I want to protect

When he sleeps he looks far older than thirty. She notices, with a slight, unhappy twist of the lips, that he seems to be another man, one without that armor of arrogance that usually surrounds him, impenetrable.


	52. Song

**6.** Death

For weeks after, every time the telephone rings he expects to hear Hughes' voice, as if the universe has, in all its incomprehensible vastness, played an exquisitely cruel trick upon him.

Hawkeye is a crutch in times like these; he leans into her unyielding presence and is comforted, somehow, by her permanence.


	53. At the window

**68.** Song

There is something about jazz and Hawkeye, the intimacy brought on by her unbound hair. Unconsciously, he leans closer, keeps his eyes fixed on the unwavering beacon of her face. He wants to forget about the military for just one night, to take her home with him, to educate her about the development of third-stream from bebop; the evolution of something edgy, fumbling, and frantic into that slow glance they are sharing, understanding and alcohol, the long line of her spine beckoning to him from the low-slung back of her dark dress.


	54. Not there

**60.** At the window

But perhaps what they have is no more than a partnership? For Lieutenant Hawkeye is professional and by the book. She would do nothing to jeopardize her career. (Some thing that she is a heartless bitch, as if such a thing were a communicable disease.)

They are wrong, of course; she's given up her whole life for the Colonel. Still, the fiction maintains itself in the crispness of her uniform, her dead eyes, the extreme part of her hair that shows the white line of her skull.


	55. God

**24.** "Not there"

Of course he was used to it, the hazard of rain, and he understood; but here and now, the chase, an Ishvarite man and those red eyes, staring—it was enough to make him forget , to make him go mad a very little about the edges (and Fullmetal was still only a child and had played no part in this. It made Roy livid, that a child would be singled out in the aftermath for _revenge_—) to take him circuitously back in time to when he could so very easily reach out and—

It was Hawkeye who brought him back to the present, of course, and it was an easy thing for her to do. It shouldn't have been, shouldn't have had to have been—but Roy was grateful for he nonetheless, and he could not stop shaking.


	56. Ultimate Weapon

**89.** Ultimate Weapon

There is a lamentable keenness in her features, a terrible hardness that is a reflection of their love. Some part of it, the best and worst aspects, is reflected in his face as well. Their love is all impossibility and all fear and the hope of sweetness; and Hawkeye has never backed away from a challenge, just as Roy has never taken the easy way out, not when it has mattered.

So they love each other with a touching sort of desperation, with the familiarity of a husband and a wife, a faithfulness that softens their glances and measures out the tones of their separate voices.

If they were human, their love would destroy them (as it is doing so any way, small pieces at a time) but they are instead soldiers, and Roy is an alchemist (and that in itself is a very different animal, a strange and dangerous new species). And despite all that stands against them, both Roy and Hawkeye know that they are History In The Making. This knowledge makes them terrible and ruthless, like strange gods; the two of them seem so young at times and older than age at others, comprised as they are of such unconfined and well-meaning hearts.

They will live like this, even unto the edge of doom.


	57. Cold hands

**49.** Cold hands

She comes in from her evening run to find him sitting at her kitchen table. As always, he resembles something nearly immaculate: his shirt is pressed, his gloves spotless. His overcoat is draped carefully over one of her hard-backed chairs. Riza realises how absurd she must look in comparison—it is raining out of doors and she has just run six miles. Therefore she is soaked and flushed with both exertion and with cold. Still, when he stands wordlessly to greet her, his arms outstretched, she goes to him, winding her body about his, the water skimming off of her clothes to soak his. (As he embraces her, his shirt becomes translucent with moisture, a magic trick.) She burrows herself into his warmth like an animal, her head against his chest and her fingers curling beneath his shirt, against his stomach. He shudders a little at her touch—her fingers are very cold—before covering her hands with one of his own, pressing her closer and the reason as to why he is here can wait a little longer. She shivers into him and cannot get warm.


	58. Special seat

**63.** Special seat

It is her turn to buy the coffee at elevenses today and she does this with her usual brisk efficiency. Her attitude is intimidating to her coworkers because she does not know how else to appear to them—all except for Hughes, who is cheerful no matter what the circumstances are—and they make their requests hurriedly. If Fuery was asking, they would be amusingly ridiculous, and would request half-packets of a certain brand of cream, sprinklings of nutmeg, extra foam. But Hawkeye is observant, and delivers the coffees as preferred, including an unnecessary (but welcome) pastry that Breda doesn't ask for: raspberry, with cheese instead of frosting.

The Colonel loves this sort of pointless domesticity, but he loves more the look Hawkeye's face takes on as she returns to her desk: an expression of satisfaction, reserved tranquillity. She takes her coffee with honey, he notices, and she licks the spoon childishly before stirring.


	59. Day off

**42.** Day off

Like old men, they have their habitual creature comforts, set apart from their lives together. Roy plays chess in the park, sometimes, or by himself. When questioned, he grumbles something about practice and that elusive beast, perfection. He doesn't like sacrificing his queen, even if the move promises a victory.

Riza writes letters on white paper with dark green ink; she has lovely penmanship and rarely falls back to commenting on the weather. Also, she buys a vase of inexpensive flowers every week or so (she always, unintentionally, kills potted plants. She's not quite certain how, but it could have something to do with absent-mindedly emptying the dregs of her coffee mug over them). She keeps the flowers on her bedside table in the evenings, but moves them into the kitchen when she's not at home. She likes gerbera daisies, in bright colours. They are hardy and cheerful.

For Christmas, at the company parties (no one is alone then, good-naturedly crowded into too small a space with plenty of alcohol) they give each other practical gifts, knowing as they do everything and nothing about their respective lives.

This year, he has given her a polished leather address book, in blue. In turn, he has received a box of white handkerchiefs, the monogram stitched painstakingly by hand in scarlet thread.


	60. Ideals and truth

**78.** Ideals and truth

She does not like to sleep alone. Rather than dwell upon this unnecessarily, she allows Back Hayate to curl up next to her on the bed, although this thing should not be allowed.

Even after she has overcome this fear, she does not bother to retrain the dog. She sleeps on her side in the center of the bed and he lies across from her, soundlessly, his furry spine against her hip. Now, in the mornings, her feet are never cold. In spring, Hayate sheds.


	61. Memories

**87.** Memories

One day the two of them will look back upon this life, its terrible and exacting uncertainties. They will mourn, with inconsolable loveliness, how the time they spent at war changed them and is heavily edited, unavoidably covered with haphazard, terrible events that resemble the footprints of birds. Of their time together, very little now remains, as if they have been reduced, in all essence, into fragments of Sappho.


	62. The pounding of a heart

The pounding of a heart

She stands barefoot on the beach, her skirt gathered to her knees in one hand, ankle-deep in surf. The foam draws small designs, like hieroglyphs, on her shins. Roy stands beside her, grinning; they have been throwing sticks into the sea for Hayate to chase for the last half of an hour.

As she bends to retrieve the latest projectile from the dog's mouth she stumbles, her feet slipping like small fish in the sand. Roy catches her as she falls; she drops the edge of her skirt into the water and laughs, leaning back into his arms and wrapping her fingers about his capable hands about her waist. Hayate barks delightedly—a new game!—and splashes them both.

It is drizzling lightly and the air smells like a storm, and fish. The beach is deserted but for the three of them. Still, they exist in all harmony, their hands full of truth, the sanctity of lovers.


	63. Are you satisfied?

**69.** Are you satisfied?

This is not gentle. It is not soft. But it is real and it is happening: they are not the sort of people to kiss lightly, all lip and sweetness, every moment some saccharine promise of tomorrow. Their kisses have depth and bite, teeth clacking against each other, scraping skin. They are harsh and unyielding and neither one is willing to surrender because this is a war, which is the same thing as love, a crime of passion. Hawkeye has twenty-eight teeth and Roy knows the grooves of each one. There is a puncture wound above the bone of his right hip that has wept for nearly a week. It won't heal soon, if at all in a place like this, and only Hawkeye knows that secret. She does not coddle him because this is not a battle of give-and-take. There is no life free from pain.

They come together like waves in a storm, with increasing violence. They are the only true constants, battling a false North and this cannot go on, but it must, it will, and unceasingly it does.


	64. Why?

**75.** Why?

Occasionally, Roy boggles at the elusive ability of time to stand still, revealing to him the common reality of his love for Hawkeye. It doesn't seem like it could be something so simple and still maintain such complexity, but Roy reads alchemical texts more often than love poetry and is therefore uneducated as toward this common phenomenon.

It is beyond passion, this love. It creeps into his occupied mind and causes him to look at her, to think that even her silences are the loveliest thing on this earth.


	65. Liar

**11.** Liar

He does not tell her that she is a goddess. Roy, like most alchemists, finds safety in atheism, and to call Hawkeye—Hawkeye, who is his still point, the dream awake—something that he does not believe in is too much duplicity for him, too faithless and cruel for this thing that can only occasionally limit to the small word "love." He doesn't call her much of anything, really, as if to do so would be crude, cheap.

He concentrates instead upon how they complete one another, the puzzle of their convoluted souls, the fire singing in his veins, the delight she expresses with movements made by her gracious fingers


	66. Grave

**4.** Grave

There had come a time (deep within the hell and heartbreak of the war, with no end in sight and no way of even trying to escape from the stench of death) when the strange thing between them had lost its purpose and its heat, when she had one night leant into him and felt no joy or elation or hungry quickening only, still, the weariness in her bones and a sense of _fitting_. She had tucked her face deep into his breastbone, past the reek of fire and flesh, and let him cling to her as he wept silent and waterless sobs. _Even our sorrows are affected by this drought_, she thought, and wished to herself, with all the little hope that lay dying in her, that the world could twist itself back to wholeness, some day.


	67. Crime and punishment

**7.** Crime and punishment

Roy wakes up in the middle of the night and regards her body next to his own. Riza does not sleep in a tangle of pale limbs; rather, her body curves consciously and economically into the spaces that he vacates. He moves imperceptibly and often, fascinated and appalled that she seeks him out and follows after, even in sleep.


	68. Given name

**88.** Given name

Riza knows lust (and she has felt it too, those dark talons insinuating themselves into the chambers of the heart in a way that manifests only as sickness). What she feels daily now is nothing so trivial or hot-blooded; if it were so she could resist it, for Riza is nothing if not patient herself.

No, there is a brightness, a steady and redeeming quality that binds her more readily to her purpose. Lust could never inspire the loyalty (which is in all its forms a kind of love, imperfect and charitable) that is so deeply a part of her, the thought that makes her helpless except as a vehicle for change.


	69. Footsteps

**81.** Footsteps

In a different life, perhaps she could have become a ticket-taker on one of those terribly noisome engines that clatter through the city on the way to greater things. She likes the swift and pronounces accuracy of the conductor's hole-punch, which is harmless and more charming than a gun, and she imagines, on days when the world has grown into a heedless tangle of events, that she could be a traveler, a witness, tied inextricably to the great and roaring engine beneath her feet.


	70. A reason to quarrel

**62.** A reason to quarrel

Occasionally they too are struck down by human pettiness, as is unavoidable. They argue—or rather, he teases and she responds with swift violence. Perhaps she does not know any other form of speech, but he still clutches his chest and gasps and accuses her of malice aforethought. They both know, unhappily, that if she wanted him dead he wouldn't know it until the after bullet had impacted his skull.


	71. Skillful and clumsy

**56.** Skillful and clumsy

"When's First Lieutenant Hawkeye's birthday?" Ed asks shyly and Roy is momentarily caught off-guard (Fullmetal speaking with civility! To him!), so much so that it takes him a moment to process the question.

The truth is, embarrassingly enough, that he doesn't know when Hawkeye was born. Women like Hawkeye are not born; they exist, immutably. Roy doesn't even know if Hawkeye has a favourite colour, so distant she appears for common humanity.

So he flips through her personal file, which is perhaps not strictly allowed and passes the date over the Ed with fewer wisecracks than is usual—Hawkeye is genuinely fond of the kid and Fullmetal is only trying to do something nice in return, after all—and then he retreats to his office to think. It seems so strange, that there can be so much between Hawkeye and himself and yet no tangible exchanges.


	72. Premonition

**71.** Premonition

He closes his eyes the first time she touches his face, and so she dares to trace a finger over the trembling, delicate lids. He is Roy and useless and rebellious dreams and she wants to capture this moment, recognizing its imperfections. More than that, she wants him to look at her and see her as Riza, a woman, not as Hawkeye, a soldier and a gun. She wants that strange and dazzling gaze he has to focus on her, to meet her honestly—because how else can love enter the body, if not through the eyes? She feels powerless and liquid in the darkness, touching the strong line of his jaw, feeling him surrender to her fingers. This is a dream of the soul of the world, all quietness, all faith, the perceptions of two people who are not yet lovers breathing in the dark, poised.


End file.
